25. The VW Beetle's Dark Past

The Volkswagen Beetle is a symbol of peace, love, and harmony. It's also a product of Nazi Germany. The story of how the Beetle transformed from Hitler's car to the Love Bug involves a British army major and a surprising team of advertisers.

Reported by Sally Herships and produced by Sarah Wyman with Dan Bobkoff and Amy Pedulla.

Transcript

Note: This transcript may contain errors.

DAN BOBKOFFF: Reporter Sally Herships was here a couple of months ago telling us the really surprising story of how KFC became synonymous with Japanese Christmas. And… she's back!

SALLY HERSHIPS: I am! And I have another story for you.

DB: It's not about KFC in Japan?

SH: No, there's only so many of those. It's a story about a car in Germany. But it starts with... a philosophy student.

It's 2007, and Andrea Hiott, she is the philosophy student - she's studying German philosophers to be specific. So, she's in the north of Germany, it's winter. And she's in this small city.

ANDREA HIOTT: And it's very melancholy. And the brightest thing there is like a birch tree. The white of the birch tree. Everything else is just very dark or was it this time.

SH: And then one day Andrea is driving to Berlin. It's cold and it's raining. And as she's driving along… all of the sudden she sees these glowing smokestacks - It's a city – Wolfsberg. There are glass buildings, bright neon signs… it just kind of unfolds – like something out of a children's book.

AH: So when we drove through it was this bright, light, huge like glowing factory, big signs kind of weird Disney World feeling of like a car… car city. In the middle of nowhere, you know seemingly.

And I was like, where are we this is so strange and they're like, oh this is you know Wolfsburg. This is the car the city that Hitler built for his car.

DB: Wait, so Hitler built an entire city for a car?

SH: He sure tried to. And Andrea was surprised too.

AH: 'Hitler built a city for his car? What car? 'And I had no idea and they sort of told me 'yeah. Everybody knows this car, you know the Beetle' and I was like, 'Hitler built a city for the Beetle? Like the hippie Beetle?'

SH: Yeah, I think we do have to pause here for just a second to underscore this. Hitler planned an entire city – to build the Beetle. That is Volkswagen's Beetle – the love bug. And if this is news to you, know that it was also news to Andrea. But yes, Cliff Notes version – Hitler commissioned the Volkswagen Beetle. He wanted it to be the people's car.

AH: I hadn't even known that it was associated with Hitler, to be honest with you I just - that part of the story hadn't gotten to me. I thought of Janis Joplin and you know, like I just the car to me was a hippie car. Like the hippie Beetle, you know, I really took me some time to kind of connect the dots and then literally that night I was researching it. Like what? Trying to figure it out.

SH: What happened?

AH: Yeah, how can it be?

DB: From Business Insider and Stitcher, this is Household Name. Brands you know, stories you don't. I'm Dan Bobkoff.

Today: the story of the Volkswagen Beetle. It's a car often associated with flower stickers… peace, love, harmony. But it was also commissioned by Hitler.

Sally Herships is back to tell us how a car born in Nazi Germany, became the people's car, but in a way different than Hitler intended. The story involves a British major, and a team of very, very unlikely advertisers.

Stay with us.

ACT I

DB: So, Sally Herships, how is it that Hitler commissions the Beetle? Where did all this begin?

SH: Well, to understand that you have to understand the idea behind the Volkswagen first. And to get there - we have to go back to 1930, before the war. And in the states, we have cars. Ford made the Model T starting way back in 1908. It's affordable – even the workers at the Ford plant can afford a Ford. So normal, everyday people could afford to buy a car. But the same thing, it's not true in 1930's Germany. Remember Andrea Hiott? She ended up writing a book: Thinking Small: The Long, Strange Trip of the Volkswagen Beetle.

AH: I mean if you can think of before there was like normal people could not drive a car. It was really for the elite.

DB: So there is no car for regular people in Germany?

SH: No. But everyone wanted one and so Andrea says the idea was in the air at the time. And that is actually what Volkswagen means—the people's car.

DB: You mean the word "volkswagen."

SH: Yeah! Volks in German translates to "people". So "volks" is a big word for Hitler and the Nazis. The Nazis were promising a volks radio, a people's refrigerator, a people's tractor, a people's television set. Pretty much everything you could want. And the idea of a people's car was huge. This wasn't about just about the design of the car, but also making it affordable. The technology was still really expensive. Think about it in current day terms. What if Americans had no cars and you are the person who is able to give it to them. You will have major clout. Enter Hitler and - the people's car.

AH: But it wasn't officially called that it was just you know, that was the term. It was actually called the Kraft Freude-Wagen the "strength through joy car" was the original name.

SH: The car was meant to be propaganda on wheels - a way to raise the living standard of average Germans.

AH: But also Hitler just loved cars. It's true. He didn't have a driver's license, but he was a bit obsessed with automobiles and the automotive world in Germany at that time.

DB: Wait, so he is spearheading a car and he doesn't even have a driver's license?

SH: No—but he has a grand plan. And in 1933 he commissions a designer to create a car for the people – you may have heard of him – his name was Ferdinand Porsche. Do you know much about Porsche, Dan?

DB: Is this the actual guy behind Porsche the brand?

SH: This is the guy. This is before Porsche existed as a brand of cars. He was an engineer then, a designer. And he was known for his temper which was described as "explosive" and also for his lack of, shall we say, desire to adhere to a budget. So these were the people responsible for the Volkswagen - this guy a reputation as an impossible perfectionist. And Hitler.

DB: What a dark start for this car.

SH: Yeah. Bernhard Rieger says the Beetle has a complex background. He teaches Modern European History at the University of Leiden and he wrote a book about the Beetle.

BERNHARD RIEGER: The moral story that stands behind this is really a very complicated one because it needs to be said this is really an idea that is borne by a dictatorship. And the reason that the car exists is really not just sort of like an accident of this dictatorship.

SH: The Volkswagen was only possible because of Hitler. Bernhard says at the time, in Germany, only the funds of a regime could have financed the Volkswagen. Private Industry wasn't up to the job. Hitler wanted to build a car that could be sold for 1,000 Reichsmarks. That's about $7,000 today.

DB: And there's no car on the market that I know of at least, especially here in the U.S., there is no car on the market that sells for anywhere near that little.

SH: No, if you do the math, this is just not financially possible. But no one wants to tell Hitler his car isn't practical. You have to understand the Beetle isn't just a car. It's meant to be a symbol of the Nazi movement.

BR: For instance, this was a car that was supposed to help the members of the people's community, ie the so-called Aryans to have for instance, a relaxing weekend so that on Monday they would be able to go back to work and support the Third Reich again in a much more efficient way.

SH: This is the Nazis idea of getting to know rural Germany. So Germans were given these little books – almost like a green stamp book, I don't know if you ever used one at the grocery store? You'd pay 5 marks a week, you would get these little stamps and put them in your book, and then eventually, when the book was full, you were supposed to get this car. Again, this was supposed to be the people's car. Every German is supposed to get a car. Except, of course, only the right Germans.

DB: [sad sigh]

BR: And I mean driving and car ownership were ideologically charged. In 1938 all Jewish Germans had to give up the driver's licenses. And they had to also hand over their cars. They were no longer allowed to drive on Germany's roads. And of course, I mean like no Jewish Germans would ever have been allowed in the Third Reich to own this car.

ARCHIVAL: Adolf Hitler opens the Berlin motor show, where he sees the latest products of the German manufacturers. He has said they must produce a people's car to cost 75 pounds...

SH: Hitler has abolished the office of president, he has forbidden non-Aryans to work as journalists, and concentration camps like Dachau and Buchenwald have been established. And now he's saying it's time to build this car.

BRUCE HANNAH: Please go do it. we're not going to have a focus group.

SH: That's product designer Bruce Hannah. He has written books about great designs, including the Volkswagen. And because of the wartime circumstances, Ferdinand Porsche essentially has a blank check to make whatever kind of car he wants.

BH: Then you allow designers and engineers and innovators and dreamers to just do something silly! And they designed these things like oh my God. That's pretty good silly thing you did. You know we like it a lot. And that only happens when you just get rid of the rules.

DB: So what makes Porsche's design for the Volkswagen Beetle so different from other cars?

SH: Well, Bruce says at this point, in the late 1930s, the design and layout of most cars hasn't changed that much since the very first models came out decades earlier. Like you know the "trunk" of a car? Do you know what that refers to?

DB: No!

SH: That actually refers to if you picture an old-fashioned classic car, picking up, like a kind of a steamer trunk, and popping it on the back of the car.

DB: Huh!

BH: Glove compartment was for the hands gloves when you're were holding the reins. No one puts gloves in the glove compartment. We put maps and things are you know now manuals that no one reads.

SH: So, in Porsche's Volkswagen Beetle, all those conventions are thrown out the window. He moves the trunk from the back to the front and the engine from the front to the back. And he comes up with a new kind of engine — it's cooled by air instead of water.

BH: So all of the, all of that, he got rid of all that. Which was pretty amazing. In like one fell swoop.

SH: Is there something to be said about designs that come specifically. Not so much about you know Hitler and Nazis but designs that come out of the need of wartime?

BH: Well I think there's also the rules go away. What happens in war is most of the rules fall away because there's no time to think about doing something you just have to do it. I mean the old the old bridge thing and there's a comeback. You know how long does is it take to build a bridge during peacetime? Five years. How long does it take to build a bridge during war? One day. You know. So you'd throw the rules out and once you throw the rules out innovation starts.

SH: But, because his design is so innovative, Porsche needs an updated factory, with a lot of new machinery. Making cars cheaply needs to be done at scale. You need a big factory. So he works hard to to stay on Hitler's good side. He even takes two prototypes of the car up to Hitler's Bavarian mountain retreat where Hitler describes them admiringly as whizzing around like bumblebees.

DB: So Hitler's sold on the Beetle?

SH: Yes. And on top of that, he convinces Hitler he needs to build that factory - the biggest car plant in Europe - AND an entire city to house the factory workers. So In 1938, an architectural firm is hired to design this city, the Strength Through Joy Car city. And then the next year, Dan, - 1939, what happens?

DB: Hitler invades Poland.

SH: It's the beginning of World War II.

ARCHIVAL: The German [unintelligible] begins its ruthless march of conquest. Poland's 34 million inhabitants crushed, scattered and enslaved...

SH: Production grinds to a halt. And it becomes clear there is no way a civilian car is going to be built.

DB: But it does get built eventually, right?

SH: Yes, but first the people's car becomes a vehicle of war. The Kubelwagen!

DB: Back in a moment with that. Stay with us.

ACT II

DB: We're back.

So it's 1939. World War II has just started — what happens to the factory during the war?

SH: Well, the new factory that was supposed to build the Volkswagen - instead, production is turned to the Kubelwagen - a military version of the Beetle.

DB: There was a military Beetle?

SH: There was a military Beetle. It was wartime beige, it had a canvas top and a very square, different body than the current Beetle - more like a bulky looking toad, or like a Jeep.

The plant also repairs aircraft and it builds anti-tank weapons. And because it's a new plant, there aren't older workers. And when war breaks out they start running the plant using slaves and forced labor — there was even a small concentration camp built on the grounds of the plant . So this plant, it is not a nice place to work. Think everything you've heard about Nazis.

BR: And I mean there was also really sadism that was going in people were going hungry habitually and when there was leftover food that was thrown away. One of the cooks for instance to prevent the inmates from eating this food was that he mixed broken glass into the remains of the food to basically injure these people. So there were really horrible stories that were going on.

SH: The war ends in 1945. Millions and millions of people are dead. Hitler's vision for the Third Reich and the car never materialized. Porsche is arrested and imprisoned by the French for War Crimes. And in Germany, and elsewhere people are starving.

ARCHIVAL: Clear confirmation of the devastating results of bomber command's long-sustained offensive against industrial Germany, in conjunction with all the work of the Americans, is now provided by these RAF films.

SH: Wolfsberg – the Strength Through Joy Car city has also been bombed. And the factory is in a really bad state. Andrea Hiott again.

AH: There was a giant bomb that was not exploded that was in the kind of tucked in between the equipment needed to build the car. So they'd assembled this whole factory. They literally created a town for the car made a factory bought a lot of expensive equipment tested it for 1.8 million miles. I mean so much had gone into this car and then the factory was bombed.

SH: So I think you know what happens in Germany after World War II, right? It gets carved up, the Allies move in, they each get a section of the country – the British, the French, the Russians, the Americans.

ARCHIVAL: A German factory is taken over for British military production. This was the huge plant erected at Hitler's order for the construction of the German People's car...

SH: The factory looks like what you would expect a place that's been bombed to look like. There's rubble everywhere... But inside, aside from that unexploded bomb - the machinery is in good shape. And there's something else you have to think about. The Allies want to strip Germany of its military power, but they also need to strengthen the country's economy. Being an occupying force is expensive - right?

DB: Right - you've food and supplies and gas… and of course, Britain's pretty broke after the war.

SH: Yes - exactly so the British don't want to get stuck importing food and supplies - which is expensive. And, they also want to avoid poverty and discontented Germans - both of which are conditions which had led to big problems in the past. And, the British have another problem - they're trying oversee their part of Germany - they're in charge of 22 million German residents and they don't have enough cars. But Ivan Hirst, a 29-year-old British army major has an idea. To get the factory running again. So, he lobbies the allied forces to get permission, and it's granted. And in 1945 - the year the war ends they manage to produce some Beetles…. 58.

DB: Do you mean like 58 thousand?

SH: No 58…

DB: Total.

SH: Total.

DB: Wow.

SH: But Hirst finds manufacturers, he finds supplies, workers, builds up a national network of dealers. Things are moving at the plant.

But eventually the British Military is going to leave. The plant will need a new owner. They're looking around for ideas… there's even a deal floated with Ford Motor. But Ford turns it down!

BH: We had occupied Germany.

SH: So the allied forces who were occupying Germany. And they literally tried to just they tried to pawn it off?

BH: They tried to give it away.

SH: Like who wants a factory?

BH: Who wants the factory?

SH: Bruce Hannah - the product designer - again.

SH: Take the factory.

BH: Yeah nobody wanted it.

SH: Ford turns this down.

BH: Yeah. Ford turned it down.

SH: And why?

BH: America wanted the big Cadillac boat with the fins and chrome. We won the war - we should have the big cars.

ARCHIVAL: It's big! It's new! It's the big news in the low-price field! The big new Studebaker! Look at it!

SH: So the Volkswagen factory gets handed over to joint owners - the Federal Republic, at the time West Germany, and the State of Lower Saxony. And in 1950 the decision is made to export cars to international markets like the US.

DB: But I thought nobody in the US wants small cars!

SH: Well, the Volkswagen does find at least one market in America… women! Women at the time often said they felt more comfortable driving smaller cars.

ARCHIVAL: [honk] If you're looking for something to surprise her with, may we suggest something small and inexpensive?

SH: And the Beetle, which is small and inexpensive, does especially well as a second car and in the suburbs. But at the same time it gets stuck in that second car niche.

DB: So how does it end up being such a big deal in the U.S.?

SH: Dan… you're not gonna believe this… with the help of a very unusual advertising firm.

DB: Stay with us.

ACT III

DB: We're back.

SH: The Beetle has made it to America, but it not shaken off its dark past.

DB: So Sally, my dad made it his life's work to teach the Holocaust. That was his way of being Jewish, we weren't religious, but… I just remember, every time we had to get a car, we would look, and German cars were always off the table. Even decades and decades later, my dad felt so strongly that because of what had happened in World War II, that we should not buy a Volkswagen or any of these other brands that had ties to Nazi Germany. We wouldn't even consider them.

SH: I get it. I mean, I went to Hebrew school four days a week, I had a bat mitzvah, I grew up being around older people who had numbers tattooed on their arms, and even as an adult I remember making plans to go visit a friend in Germany and my mom saying something to me like 'I will never step foot in that country.'

DB: Did your family have German cars growing up, or even consider them?

SH: No, I think we had Mazdas, so they were Japanese cars.

DB: So I just wonder… in this story now, we're talking what 15, 20 years after World War II, and the VW bug is on the market, weren't customers turned off by this car's sordid past?

SH: Yes. It was a problem. And that plus the fact that Volkswagen wants to reach a bigger market means it's time to rethink the company's advertising strategy.

Alfredo Marc Antonio worked in Volkswagen's advertising department in Great Britain in the '70s, and he remembers the preceding decade well.

SH: So what was a typical ad for a car. Just an imaginary ad for a car like a Chevrolet or a Ford like at the time just to compare like what would it say?

ALFREDO MARC ANTONIO: Detroit's ads tended to be across two pages. Full color - car often retouched to make it longer and wider or whatever. With an admiring woman looking at a handsome man driving it. Or perhaps the two of them together with the car parked in the driveway of a very glamorous looking house in Connecticut.

DB: I guess that is the American dream in a car ad.

SH: Yeah, like I can imagine that in a spread in Life Magazine. Right? So Volkswagen hires an advertising agency – DDB – Doyle Dane and Bernbach. This is a big part of the story of how the Beetle went from its Nazi war roots to a symbol of peace love and happiness. Because an executive at DDB, the ad agency, decides to do something pretty crazy.

AMA: He said in fact I've got a great gimmick. Let's tell the truth.

DB: Wait, so you're saying advertisers weren't 100% truthful about everything?

SH: I know, it's pretty shocking Dan, right? They were selectively truthful.

The bug is small, slow, and people say it looks kind of ugly. So in 1959, DDB starts putting out ads say things like 'if you run out of gas – it's easy to push' or 'it makes your house look bigger' or 'ugly is only skin deep.' Here's a TV version of that idea...

VW AD: I didn't know what I had. She was dependable, reliable, not very glamorous though. That's why I left. For beauty… So I came running back.

Another person who found out that inner goodness is far more important than outward appearance.

SH: And because DDB is honest about the car's negatives, when the company talks about the car's pluses – American consumers listen and they believe.

SH: Wow. So he was he was basically establishing trust with the with America with the American consumer. And so people because he was so honest...

AMA: Yeah, well well nobody in the world had done it. I mean British advertising, everybody's advertising all over the world was complimentary about his product all the time. That's all people ever did. And so when he all of a sudden started telling the truth, then it changed the game.

SH: But Dan, there was something else unusual about this advertising agency.

DB: Aside from their unusual strategy of telling the truth?

SH: Yeah. And to understand that, to figure out what that was you do not have to look very hard – just at some of the other companies the firm was working for at the time. Like... El Al airlines –

DB: Meaning like the national airline of Israel?

SH: Yes… and then there was Levy's Matzoh…

DB: Uh huh. Ok I'm starting to sense a trend…

AMA: Well you have to appreciate and this is and this is a very odd thing in a way. It was quite a Jewish Agency DDB.

DB: What?

SH: Yeah, the company that helped make volkswagen… this car that was commissioned by Hitler and borne out of the Nazi party… the company that helped make this big in America… it was a Jewish advertising company. It was a company run by Jews.

DB: And they were ok with this?

SH: No. (laughs) So, Bill Bernbach who ran the firm was Jewish. And a lot of his clients were Jews… And even though he takes on the job, there is, understandably, some pushback.

AMA: And when he decided to pitch for the Volkswagen account there was a fair bit of unrest in the agency, 'should we be doing this?' Because you know they were Jewish but Bernbach you know convinced them that you know the war was over and you know they shouldn't be embittered and they say they pitch for the business and won it.

SH: But an employee by the name of George Lois, who is actually part of the team responsible for the most groundbreaking and famous Volkswagen ads, he is not so comfortable.

AMA: And he argued with Bernbach and said 'maybe we shouldn't be doing this' but Bernbach said 'no we're going to do it.' And eventually George Lois came back to him after been thinking about the campaign for a while and said very famously, 'you know what the problem is Bill?' He said 'no.' He said, 'we've got to sell a Nazi car in a Jewish town.' And that sentence George Lois said has gone down as a sort of historic advertising line.

SH: But, DDB didn't just hire Jews – the company was full of minorities. Or as they called them at the time – "ethnics".

AMA: The other thing is Doyle Dane was almost the only agency in New York that hired ethnics. The whole of the American industry of advertising not just in New York but across America was WASP: White Anglo-Saxon Protestant management, creative people ,everything. They were all you know from Harvard, Yale, or wherever it might be. There were no ethnics there.

SH: Except at DDB.

DB: Except at DDB.

AMA: And also, Birnbach very unusually, his first copy chief was a woman. Well women in advertising in the states were you know there to have their bottoms pinched not their brains picked you know so that again was a big change.

SH: The ads they come up with are a legend. They are often considered to be the best ads of the 20th century. And Bruce Hannah, the product designer, has this memory of a TV ad he loves.

BH: The screen is completely black. You can't see the car but you hear it. And you hear this wonderful sound of the Volkswagen coming in. And it turns and it goes away. And the tagline is 'we didn't change anything.' (laughs) What a magnificent thing to say about a design. We didn't change anything. It's the same car. You want one – they're at your dealer today. Whereas everybody else at the time is going, 'Well the fins are bigger, we have better colors. We have bucket seats.' Who cares? Who cares about that? When what you're selling is in the end love.

SH: And there's one Volkswagen ad in the 60s that really strikes a chord with a new generation. Have you seen it, Dan? The slogan is "Think Small."

DB: This is that one where there's just a tiny little car and all that white space. It just looks so… like such a contemporary ad. I can't believe it's from decades ago.

SH: Yeah, and it hits really deep with a certain segment of the American public.

AH: Think small like if you're a counterculture person if you're a young person going to university seeing that your parents have the big car and the washing machine and still aren't happy. But still seeing that that's the thing you're supposed to be wanting. Yeah, maybe thinking small is better than thinking big.

SH: So Andrea says we have kind of have this perfect storm – there's this strange car that didn't fit the mold of a what a car should look like. We have this small, outsider ad agency… and then we have the counterculture happening. And Think Small ends up getting pretty big. People love the Beetle.

BH: And the wonderful thing about the Volkswagen was - it didn't matter. It embraced you anyway it said oh no I don't really mind. It could be anything you want. It sort of fit everybody, you know if you had a tuxedo on you could drive it and wow you look really good in there. You had a bikini on you looked great in it. For some reason it was this neutral background that you could just be part of and it accepted you. It was this neutral palette. It was like ok what do you want me to be today? I'll be that.

SH: You can put a flower sticker on the side or you could strap a surfboard to the roof.

BH: Some people never took drugs or went to Woodstock or whatever, you know, they just tried to live a different kind of life or maybe do take a job of something they cared about instead of something just to buy the next big car. And I think the car just hit that hit that wave at just the right time it became their car. These are the people who bought that car.

SH: There's even a countercultural style how-to manual for the Beetle...

BR: ...which taught you how to basically listen to your car and sort of make sure that its karma stayed intact and positive.

SH: It was a bestseller! I see you laughing! This was a car you could customize! You got drag racers, you had dune buggies down at the beach. The Beetle even got a Disney Movie of its own -"The Love Bug," about a racecar driver who encounters a car with a mind of its own.

HERBIE ARCHIVAL:
[car screeches to a halt]
Did you see this thing take off??
One of your showboat tricks, Mr. Douglas?
I tell you, I had nothing to do with it! Hey, we were turning!

SH: The Beetle is exported around the world, and everywhere it goes, it's loved, but for different reasons. Like, in Germany, the Beetle is not for rebels. Instead, it's appreciated as a symbol of reliability… and resilience.

BR: I mean when I was talking to my German friends and especially say older family relatives about this association with unconventionality, they said 'yes, of course in West Germany students also drove this car but it never had this reputation for unconventionality or that you could do everything with it.' It was first and foremost sort of like this rather reliable rather sturdy object. But if you then take the car to Mexico, it basically becomes a Mexican because it is as sturdy as life in that country with bad roads and a lot of unreliable government.

SH: Wherever it went, it became part of people's lives.

LISTENER: My husband got it brand new in college, and when we got married, it became our family car. We brought both our children home from the hospital in it.

LISTENER: I remember my brother and I used to argue over who would sit in the well that was behind the back seat, and when we drove home up the long hill towards our house, my father would purposefully swerve the car back and forth, and we would bounce around inside the car like popcorn and hang onto the vinyl strap that was hanging down.

LISTENER: My mom is on her fourth Beetle. and we had matching cars for years. We loved to take pictures hanging out of the sunroof, and parking next to each other was always so much fun.

LISTENER: I love driving by people, kids mostly, and seeing them, punching the person beside them, saying "punch bug!"

LISTENER: Fellow Beetle drivers would wave when you passed on the road, it was a sisterhood, a brotherhood.

SH: And every bug had a name, too.

LISTENER: My dad's blue Beetle was named Shadowfax,

LISTENER: They first owned a yellow one that we called the lemon,

LISTENER: And my mom's blue Beetle was named Samuel.

LISTENER: And then an orange one that we rather uncreatively called the orange.

LISTENER: My Beetle was yellow. She was named Ly-B, spelled L-Y-B. For little yellow bug.

SH: Bernhard Rieger also had a Beetle.

BR: We had a Beetle. So I have my own little Beetle memories from when I was really really little little as does my wife who is American. So she also grew up partly in a Beetle in Buffalo, New York, and her Beetle was called or her family Beetle was called Jimmy the Cricket.

SH: Did you did your car have a name too in your family?

BR: Yeah - der steinbeißer - it was gray. And that means the stonebiter.

SALLY: The stonebiter - why the stone-

BR: Well the stonebiter because it just never gave up. It was like it would basically grind away like somebody would if they are chewing stones.

SH: Volkswagen sold the original Beetle in the US for decades. By its last year, 1980, it sold 5 million bugs.

SH: I guess one of the questions I'm struggling with is like, what is the car to people is? I mean this might I was like, is it a family member? Is it a religion? Is it a culture?

AH: I mean, it's definitely all that stuff. But I think you know of you if you have like a band that you really like, that you that that the songs just happened to come at just the right time in life and you. You were playing that music you were experiencing certain things that you remember when you hear that music now, the car is like that a little bit for a lot of people... it's an experience, you know.

DB: Andrea Hiott stumbled onto VW's history and the history of the Beetle just by accident… by driving around Germany. I grew up with this story. I remember seeing as a kid old ads for the VW Beetle and you know it was in pop culture, Herbie, and the Lovebug, and you know the Beetle was everywhere. And I remember my dad pulling me aside and telling the real story of where that car came from. And so from a really young age, I knew that it was connected to Hitler and the Holocaust. And I have a hard time shaking that.

SH: And I guess that really is the question here. What's more important: where the Beetle came from, or what it became?

BH: I've thought about that about other things like that and I thought about like what are the great what's the great art. Do we know the pope that commissioned the Sistine Chapel? Do we even care? Do we care what art the Medicis commissioned? I mean they were bad people. But for some reason I think art and design transcend, lots of times, the impetus for it. And all of sudden it's transformers like oh my God. It's not a symbol of the Reich. It's a symbol of peace.

SH: A symbol of peace… I can live with that.

DB: Thank you for bringing us this story, Sally.

SH: Thank you.

CREDITS

DB: If you have comments or story ideas, get in touch: you can email us at householdname@insider.com or go to our Facebook group… just search for Household Name Podcast.

We're working on a new segment of our show, featuring brands from around the world, and we're starting with… FREDDOS!

Do you know what Freddos are? Do you have feelings about how much they cost or how they taste? Maybe fond Freddos memories from your childhood to share? Send us an email at householdname@insider.com or let me know on Twitter. I'm @danbobkoff.

Please also leave us a review and rating on Apple Podcasts, it really helps people find the show.

This episode was reported by Sally Herships and produced by Sarah Wyman with Amy Pedulla and me.

Our editor is Gianna Palmer.Sound design and original music by John DeLore and Casey Holford.

Special thanks to Folkert Coehoorn, Samuel Robinson, Christian Betz.

And to our listeners who sent in their VW bug stories:

My name is Alice Adler, and I live in Jamestown, RI.

My name is Sarah, and I live in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Hi! I'm Natalie Craig from Rome, Georgia.

Hi, my name is Sarah, and I live in Pallacia, New York.

Hi. My name is Barbara Hagy. I live in Los Angeles now, but I lived outside of Philadelphia when we had our 1968 Beetle.

The executive producers of Household Name are Chris Bannon, Jenny Radelet and me.

Household Name is a production of Insider Audio.